Dr. Emma Denney (she/they) is the community resource navigator at the LGBTQ Iowa Archives & Library in Iowa City. She regularly tracks anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the state legislature, traveling to Des Moines to speak against them. She holds a Ph.D. in composition from the University of Iowa and makes music under the name .em. V […]
HIV/AIDS History
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Peak Iowa: Arthur Russell, Oskaloosa’s lost genius
Tape hung like curtains in Arthur Russell’s apartment. The recording devices responsible were powered by an extension cord that ran out the window and down a few floors to Allen Ginsberg’s. Russell left behind 166 feet of tape when he died, only 40 years old, of AIDS-related illness in 1992. And if you’ll let me […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: Revisiting ‘Iowa,’ Patrick Moore’s neglected gay novel
This monthly column will explore the long and diverse history of literature’s Midwestern engagements. There is an established canon of American literature in which the Midwest plays heavily, as a both physical and social place.
Posted inCommunity/News
Sue Gilbert — Saint Suzie to queer nuns everywhere — recalls all the drag, drama and action of Iowa City’s gay scene in the ’70s
It’s time for Sue Gilbert to come clean. At least, that’s what she told me in an email leading up to this interview. Gilbert played a supporting role in the growth of Iowa City’s drag and Gay Pride scene in the ’70s — and, thanks to a bizarre and surely predestined string of circumstances, planted […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Keith Haring left his mark on Iowa City. Thirty-five years later, it will go on public display for the first time.
From kindergarten through sixth grade, I spent countless hours staring at a wall in the Horn Elementary School library, daydreaming while an adult read a book to the class. Far more compelling than a fire alarm or a poster of LeVar Burton, I would fixate on a massive mural mounted on the wall of the […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Along with banning books and targeting LGBTQ students, SF 496 also cut requirement for schools to provide information on HIV/AIDS and HPV
It’s World AIDS Day. Since 1988, the first day of December has been recognized as a day on which to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and remember those who died because of the disease. Around the same time World AIDS Day was first commemorated, Iowa began requiring public schools to provide age-appropriate information about HIV/AIDS to […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Album Review: Elizabeth Moen — ‘For Arthur’
For Arthur by Elizabeth Moen The teenaged Arthur Russell left Oskaloosa in 1968. He was a musical prodigy (cello and piano), a hippie vagabond and a spiritual seeker. He moved to a Buddhist commune in San Francisco, passed his high school equivalency, then became Allen Ginsberg’s accompanist and perhaps lover. Five years later, he hopped […]
Posted inCommunity/News
‘We all suffer from the loss of them’: How the AIDS crisis shaped the next generation of LGBTQ activism in Iowa City
This is the final article in a three-part series examining the legacy of HIV/AIDS in Iowa City. In the early 1980s, Rev. John Harper was a fresh-faced graduate student at the University of Iowa and a semi-active member of the Gay People’s Union. He’d heard about some disease affecting gay men in New York and […]
Posted inCommunity/News
‘No one believed that it would ever come to this place’: Fear and hatred clouded efforts to care for Iowa’s early AIDS patients
This is the second article in a three-part series examining the legacy of HIV/AIDS in Iowa City. Read part one here. It’s October 1980, and Jack Stapleton is treating a 19-year-old girl diagnosed with a rare lung infection: pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Stapleton, then an internal medicine intern in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, became interested in […]
Posted inCommunity/News
During the ‘wild, bucking ’70s’, Iowa City’s lesbian and gay communities were often at odds. A crisis brought them together.
This article is part one in a three-part series from Adria Carpenter exploring the history of HIV/AIDS activism in Iowa City. Part two and three will be published in the weeks to come. In the early 1980s, Rev. John Harper was a fresh-faced graduate student at the University of Iowa and a semi-active member of […]
